“There’s nothing that can explode!” is a
praeternaturally apposite line at which for a venue’s safety alarms to
go off, but that’s what happened on the first press night in Hampstead
Theatre’s 50th-anniversary season. Actors Jasper Britton and Claire
Price struggled heroically against the beeps and flashing lights whilst
the venue staff repeatedly re-set the circuit, but the apparatus proved
so persistent that proceedings had to be halted for several minutes.
(Extraordinary how potent cheap sirens are.) Perhaps pointedly, play
was resumed at the line, “Give me [a cigarette]… I am in such a rage!”
Nor was that the only intrusion of the contemporary world into the
milieu of Elyot and Amanda in Noël Coward’s 1930 play. (The
Hampstead is commemorating what, amazingly, amounted to its rediscovery
of the then-neglected work for a 1962 revival.) Director Lucy Bailey
and her cast eschew all period poise and crispness, either in physical
manner or in diction. (Katrina Lindsay’s design for Amanda’s Parisian
flat in Act Two also looks more like a 1960s loft apartment with
Thirties furnishings.) Bailey’s career highlights include adaptations
of period movies
Baby Doll
and
The Postman Always Rings Twice,
so I presume her strategy here is a deliberate choice. As Elyot and
Amanda flee their respective second honeymoons to live in sin together
before falling back into their old wrangling, Bailey perhaps intends to
illustrate that the Cowardian mix of violence and ridiculousness in
such a “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em” relationship is as
salient today as nearly 80 years ago.
This has some payoffs. Jasper Britton can find the absurdity in himself
and events around him in any historical or emotional key, so his Elyot
is as vital as a flame; Price, who at first seems a little ingenuous as
Amanda, turns this to her advantage in the first scene of unexpected
reunion, her brittle pleasantries carrying an edge of hysteria which
suggests that Amanda may be half-mad and trying not to lose the rest.
Alas, these possibilities do not mature or develop, and in the end we
lose more by being deprived of the contrast between impeccable
conventions of dress and speech and
outré
personal conduct. Instead of connecting us with the characters, the
modern playing style gravely diminishes their impact.
Written for the Financial
Times.